as Deir Mimas.  Nothing could stop them.  Their tongues were projecting, their eyes glaring, and on they went.  The fellaheen along the roads caught them as they could, and sold them to their neighbors.  Fine camels worth eighty dollars, were sold for four or five dollars a head, and in some villages the fat animals were butchered and sold for beef.  Some of them came to Deir Mimas, where two of the missionaries lived.  The Protestants said to the missionaries, “here are noble camels selling for five and ten dollars, shall we buy?  Others are buying.”  “By no means,” they told them.  “They are stolen or strayed property, and you will repent it if you touch them.”  Others bought and feasted on camel steaks, and camel soup, and camel kibby, but the Protestants would not touch them.  In a day or two, the cavalry of the Turks came scouring the country for the camels, as they were the spoils of war.  Then the poor fellaheen were sorry enough that they had bought and eaten the camels, for the Turks made them pay back double the price of the beasts, and the Protestants found that “honesty was the best policy.”

The camel is very sure footed, but cannot travel on muddy and slippery roads.  The Arabs say “the camel never falls, but if he falls, he never gets up again.”  They carry long timbers over Lebanon, on the steep and rocky roads, the timber being balanced on the pack saddle, one end extending out on front, and the other behind.  Sometimes the timber begins to swing about, and down the camel goes over the precipice and is dashed to pieces.

The Arabs say that a man once asked a camel, “What made your neck so crooked?” The camel answered, “My neck?  Why did you ask about my neck?  Is there anything else straight about me, that led you to notice my neck?” This has a meaning, which is, that when a man’s habits are all bad, there is no use in talking about one of them.

Perhaps you will ask, did you ever eat camel’s flesh?  Certainly.  We do not get it in Beirut, as camels are too expensive along the sea-coast to be used as food, but in the interior towns, like Hums and Hamath, which border on the desert or rather the great plains occupied by the ten thousands of the Bedawin, camel’s meat is a common article in the market.  They butcher fat camels, and young camel colts that have broken their legs, and sometimes their meat is as delicious as beefsteak.  But when they kill an old lean worn-out camel, that has been besmeared with pitch and tar for many years, and has been journeying under heavy loads from Aleppo to Damascus until he is what the Arabs call a “basket of bones,” and then kill him to save his life, or rather his beef, the meat is not very delicate.

The Arab name for a camel is “Jemel” which means beauty!  They call him so perhaps because there is no beauty in him.  You will read in books, that the camel is the “ship of the desert.”  He is very much like a ship, as he carries a heavy cargo over the ocean-like plains and “buraries” or wilds of the Syrian and Arabian deserts.  He is also like a ship in making people sea-sick who ride on his back, and because he has a strong odor of tar and pitch like the hold of a ship, which sometimes you can perceive at a long distance.